In this segment of The Real Hustle, the Hustlers dress themselves as security van guards and walk into a store to collect the shop’s weekly earnings. Sometimes, being dressed for the part and being at the right place and the right time is all it takes for crooks to get away with a huge profit.
Facebook Worth $100 Billion?
By David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Do you think Facebook is stupid, or that it only appeals to the lowest common denominator of the people on the Internet? Would it then shock you that some people are already saying that the Facebook platform may one day be worth upwards of $100 billion dollars?
From Scobleizer
At the Graphing Social Patterns conference there was a guy who said that Facebook was worth $100 billion. He was properly derided, in my view, by most of the people at the conference.
But, one of his arguments was “would you have said that Google wasn’t going to be worth $100 billion back in 1999?” Yeah, I probably would have said you were smoking good crack if you told me that back then.
Problem is that if you said that back then you would actually have been right.
Now, in eight years will Facebook be worth $100 billion?
Personally, while I use Facebook, and it has become an e-mail replacement for my wife to communicate to her friends, I really hope that the service is eventually superseded by something better, more fulfilling, and with less of the application garbage that Facebook has allowed to crud up people’s profiles.
Sorry all, it was only fun when it was new. I really don’t want to be a vampire and bite people.
Pamcakes from 1938 Media gets it right in her recent video. All of these networks lack the ability to compartmentalize your life online, like it is offline. I don’t want my co-workers to see my status is “I am sick of work”. I don’t want my friends to get social media promotion requests.
What do you think, will Facebook become a $100 billion dollar company over the coming years, or is doomed to be replaced much like MySpace was?
Thursday afternoon fun: Manliest commercial ever made
For all you guys out there, please remember that If hockey jungle sex threeway, you could sex cars giant breasts, and with power tools sex sports beef jerky miss november, that could mean golf scotch fried bologna sandwiches. Enjoy the show!
Nintendo Launches MyWiiStory.com
By David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
First Nintendo shuts down their forums, saying that they will bring something better out, and then they launch My Wii Story? Seriously!?
While I love the Wii, despite not being able to play it often due to my wife loving it even more than me, I don’t see this as a real community effort, but instead another way for them to spin their wares to a wide variety of people.
I know the Wii is for casual gamers, but I’d really rather them bring back their forums. Where is a die-hard Wii fan supposed to communicate with other die-hard fans? My Wii Story doesn’t seem like that platform, but judge for yourself. Here are some details from Nintendo’s press release, “It’s a place where Wii owners and their friends and family have been gathering to post real-life anecdotes about the way that Wii has changed their social dynamic or even their opinions about video games. Men and women, young and old, kids and grandparents — people of all types have posted anecdotes, photos and videos of their experiences with Wii.”
This definitely isn’t what I had in mind for a Nintendo Wii community. Back to the drawing board Nintendo.
Crysis to Require a Monster Computer
With everyone looking forward to what should be one of the most beautiful video games, Crysis, I was wondering if I would be able to play it when it came out, and much to my surprise, the required and recommended specifications have just been released, and while I do have a system that meets the minimum requirements, I am a bit behind on the gear needed to meet the recommended system requirements.
Minimum System Requirements
OS – Windows XP or Windows Vista
Processor – 2.8 GHz or faster (XP) or 3.2 GHz or faster* (Vista)
Memory – 1.0 GB RAM (XP) or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
Video Card -NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT 256 MB / ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (X800 Pro for Vista)
Hard Drive – 12GB Free Space
Recommended System Requirements
OS – Windows XP / Vista
Processor – Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory – 2.0 GB RAM
GPU – NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS/640 or similar
Does your system meet the minimum requirements? How about the recommended requirements? Are games starting to ask us to drop too much money to keep up with the visuals they want to push to us?
I am not really a console gamer, but these types of requirements mean that I will be playing my Xbox 360 until the recommended video cards come down in price.
source: 1up.com
The Wheel of Death (Video)
Circus tricks have certainly evolved since my childhood, and the following video hammers this point home. You have to be a complete nut job to partake in such a trick. Enjoy the show!
5 Tips to Get What You Want From Technology Retail
By Fred Roth
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
In my daily sweep across my favorite tech news sites (next to [GAS], of course), I read an article listing 10 behaviors to adopt in order to get what you want from customer service centers.
With the holiday shopping season fast approaching (believe me, we employees are already hearing it at retail stores), I thought I’d offer up a list of things to do if you want to get what you want while shopping for technology, from someone who will be selling it to you!
Xbox 360: Holiday Bundle includes 2 Games
If you haven’t got an Xbox 360 yet for some reason, and you are interested in purchasing one, then check out the new bundle that Microsoft is putting out for the holidays.
Buy either the Xbox 360 Premium ($349.99) or Elite ($449.99), and get two games, Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I haven’t had the opportunity to try either of these games yet, but in lieu of a price drop, this is still a pretty darn good deal. Including the two games, if you would have purchased them, saves you around $70-$90 depending on the current pricing in your region.
Personally, I wish they’d drop the Forza and give a second controller for free in the bundle, but I have to admit that Microsoft is very aggressively promoting their Xbox 360, so much so that I wonder what kind of bundles they will be building next year.
Both bundles will be available starting sometime this month, with no current notice of its end. I wouldn’t bet on this bundle being around after Christmas though.
What would you like to see in a reasonable Xbox 360 bundle? I would love to see it include the wireless dongle, and a second controller as I think that would make the Elite version match its namesake better.
Google Buys Jaiku
The Twitter-like service from Finland, Jaiku, has been purchased by search engine behemoth, Google.
My first thought after finding out about this was, “why?” Google doesn’t really need a micro-blogging platform, and if they were going to purchase one, why take what most people consider to be the second best or third best, at least in popularity.
Some people are saying this is just one of many mobile phone related services that Google is either buying or building to increase their market penetration in the cell phone, iPhone, connected devices market.
It will be interesting to see how much they paid for the service, as it will most likely add credence to the continuing growth of the Web 2.0 bubble that has been mentioned increasingly more often.
Here is the blog post on Jaiku’s home page about the acquisition:
Wonderful Jaiku users,
Exciting news, Jaiku is joining Google!While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.
But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.
Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders
Do you Jaiku? Have your say about Google buying Jaiku in the comments.
The Small Ads Scam (Video)
In this segment of The Real Hustle, the hustlers demonstrate exactly why you should always read the small print before buying anything online.